Only 90s kids would know. Only 80s kids would know. Only Gen-X or Y or Z-ers would know. Jon Rafman might know, but he also knows that prolepsis, anachronism, and non-location are more suitable benchmarks for this twisted ouroboros we’ve made of time. At Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, the juxtaposition of immersive films by Rafman and Stan VanDerBeek, made decades apart, charts a rising threshold of popular vision that correlates to a kind of political decline—the history of cinema as protracted backfire.

Activist VanDerBeek made the majority of his films in the 1950s and 60s. Steeped in idealism, he believed avant-garde cinema could point the way toward a utopian marriage of art and technology, bringing individual human consciousness to a level of collective global understanding. Today, Rafman’s bleeding-edge cinematic techniques burrow the rift between the promises of expanded technology and its various fumbles—at the hands of those who create it, or those it’s supposed to serve.

VanDerBeek’s three abstract, psychedelic animations triptych-ed here seem almost quaint next to Rafman’s Cronenberg-drenched, body-horror phantasmagoria—a first-person shooter game soundtracked by Linkin Park and come to life. Put on the Oculus Rift VR headset for Transdimensional Serpent (2016) and, seated on a winding snake munching its own tail, you will hear snippets of the band’s early-aughts hit, an anthem of white male angst that quickly achieved secondary popularity as an ironic meme: I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

The avant-garde is a moving target. But we’re still trying.

Rafman’s aesthetics have shed the vestiges of Romanticism that characterized earlier projects like the disturbing but ultimately poignant photo essay The 9 Eyes of Google Street View(2009). His three film installations here don’t merely depict the subject of the basement-dwelling betamale, but command an escalating immersion that places us in his very headspace. Poor Magic (2017) situates us in a theater of globby, pustulous seating shaped after megaplex movie chairs and domestic patio furniture: picture a young man swinging sulkily in a hanging chaise at the edge of the family barbeque, ears plugged with Linkin Park, every happy face and idle chat colored with his disgust. Open Heart Warrior (2016) is a kind of guided meditation that undermines its own mindfulness with paranoid fatalisms (“you are a slave to your body”) while Transdimensional Serpent swallows you whole, zipping you through a collage of crowded landscapes redolent of moralistic sci-fi blockbusters like The Matrix and Avatar.

Benjamin’s assertion that “the ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film,” is both mangled and affirmed in the theta-male poetics of Poor Magic, where a voice—reminiscent of Liam Neeson’s signature histrionics in the Taken movie franchise—warns: “If you can’t sleep at night, it means you’re trapped in someone else’s dream.” Neeson’s portrayal of angst has also been extensively mocked through the meme-iverse, a world created by the kind of self-disenfranchised males Rafman encounters through his online flâneurie in anonymous forums like 4chan (indeed the conventions of the static meme—white impact bold typeface over an image—have been traced to 4chan specifically).

Why all the body-horror in the midst these fantasies? Images that emanate from screens must also cross the transom of individual subjective consciousness, a non-location Jacques Lacan characterized as a kind of screen, which later theorists proceeded to flip this way and that, until the internet married the two and we wrapped ourselves up in it like a digital blankie, an Oculus Rift, an online fantasy life some would occupy indefinitely if they didn’t have to shit at least once in a while—though adult diapers marketed specifically to gamers might make quick work of that. Are Rafman’s fleshy seats our collective bedsore?

The backfire of cinematic promise articulated in VanDerBeek’s Astral Man (1959) is the danger of a subjective reality structurally impeding the kind of collective reality that actually changes the world—that place where laws are made, bills are signed, forests are razed, people are dying, loving, getting rejected, and moving on with it. Cheat codes don’t work there. Gaston Bachelard’s theories about psychic architecture being modeled after one’s childhood home have a sinister parallel intimated here: a political nihilism shaped by frittering away one’s “best” years in mom’s basement. An interesting case has been made for a radicalization of young American men online that has led us to this fraught moment: one where the fight for equal rights has been taken as a grab for privilege (as if it were a zero-sum game). We don’t know what a world of equal privilege looks like, and we don’t have to know as long as we can retreat into whatever world suits each of us best. Only 90s kids would know what it’s like to act like we’re still in the 90s.

Bachelard also said that, “When the image is new, the world is new.” If that’s true, then we are stuck. Western society has crafted itself as an image out of time, straining to halt its own displacement by a new image: that free and equitable rainbow world VanDerBeek so ecstatically believed we were capable of creating.